


Embrace

by sshysmm



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: 1980s, 1987 uk general election, Book 5: The Ringed Castle, Camden Market, Cultural References, F/M, Falling In Love, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, Gen, Head Injury, Impromptu music, Languish Locked in L, Prompt Fill, bad song re-writing, the band Au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-27 01:21:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21383755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: After the memorial service for a friend, Philippa leads a small party to Camden Market: fun is had, musical instruments are improvised, Madonna songs are ruined, and lives are changed.--Written for Whumptober 2019, set in the Band AU I've been writing (see collections).--There's 31 of these ficlets and I apologise profusely for burying other work in the tags. I will *always* tag these as 'the band au' and you can usethis nifty extension (ao3rdr)to block the tag if this isn't your thing and isn't what you want to see in the Lymond tags!
Relationships: Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny/Philippa Somerville
Kudos: 2
Collections: Ficlets in the Lymond Band AU for Whumptober 2019





	Embrace

**Author's Note:**

> [Originally posted on tumblr, 31 October 2019.](https://notasapleasure.tumblr.com/post/188719791082/whumptober-31)

Slack-lidded eyes regarded her coolly: “Ah, the Raspberry Beret itself?”

Philippa settled the hat over her straight dark hair and fringe. “It’s fuchsia, actually. It would clash dreadfully with His Purpleness.”

Quitting the café, the small group wandered along the edge of the canal, dodging the detritus of market stalls and aimless Sunday gatherings of various counter cultures. Subsequent to the memorial service, lunch had been an early, gently boozy affair in Primrose Hill, now followed by a stroll down to the Electric Ballroom and on, to the market at Regent’s Canal. The November sun was sharp and sweet, casting a lemon-yellow glow on faces and burning stark shadows onto the pavement. Cheeks were flushed with one-pint warmth and the smell of spiced dal clung to their hair and clothes.

Among the group was Nicholas Chancellor, a teenager with the hope of cheer in his eyes, hands shoved deep in his dad’s old leather jacket, who listened carefully in order to learn from the legends he found himself among. One such was Ludo d'Harcourt, master sound technician and then-bassist with St Mary’s. Ludo’s tall, broad frame was awkwardly hunched as he, too, pocketed his fingers away from the biting wind. His ears peeked out from beneath the black oily curls of his hair, his skin blotched red with cold. To the side, maintaining an ironic distance, was Lymond, for once without his ushanka, but nevertheless dressed neck to toe in smart, heavy black. The only exceptions to the darkness were an embroidered Russian shawl wrapped around his neck, and an unusually relaxed expression: a pleased squint behind simple, silver-framed glasses. Philippa - the Vegas bride he had not been able to break free of - led the small troupe. She was easy to track by the pink beret, but otherwise her outfit was as sombre as Lymond’s: sensibly-heeled boots and form-hugging black jeans, a wide-shouldered brocade jacket and a crisp white blouse. Her smile, outlined in dramatic but tasteful crimson lipstick, set off the sun’s sparkle on the water below them.

Philippa had been describing the Christmas concert she thought she would put on in aid of the dejected members of Red Wedge. They were musicians and comedians who had hoped to change the world with their art, but the activist group had been left disappointed in the wake of the summer’s election: all their efforts saw in return was another Tory victory. Another four years - at least - of Prime Minister Thatcher.

“So, a benefit gig in aid of benefit gigs?” Lymond asked mildly.

Philippa tossed her head. “Something like that,” there was a tart edge to her cheer. “Poor Billy looks so sad these days.” Her gaze skipped lightly past stalls selling neon PVC catsuits, handcrafted jewellery for unimaginable body piercings, and tie-dyed harem pants.

“Poor Billy,” Lymond scoffed. “That’s just his face. If Kinnock had won he’d be sad his miserable concerts were no longer necessary.”

Rolling her eyes at this display of cynicism, Philippa drifted over to a stall selling trinkets of all shapes and sizes. “Hi Mister Holt, anything good today?”

The vendor grinned in recognition. “It’s all good, Mistress Philippa! I know your exotic tastes, how about some authentic chopsticks, straight from China.”

Philippa examined the wares: black lacquered wood painted with golden, swirling creatures and flowing patterns. They still had rounded buds on their ends, betraying an original use unconnected with the dining table. "How nice,“ she observed. “Authentically chopsticks, or authentically from China?” She handed the painted drumsticks to Nicholas, who had come near to see what Philippa’s insider knowledge got her. Mister Holt simply wagged an indulgent finger at her.

“Exotic tastes?” Lymond enquired, peering over Nicholas’s other shoulder. “But what can shock a woman well-versed in the advice pages of _Cosmopolitan_ and the tenets of Osho?”

Philippa raised a steady brow and drifted away from the stall. “An anatomy textbook, for one, if that were the only knowledge she had of the world.”

Experimentally, to hide the fact that he had no idea what they were talking about, Nicholas tapped the sticks on the edge of a metal incense burner that hung from the stall front. He decided, with a shy grin, that the sound was good, and continued to drum out a stuttering beat, glancing surreptitiously up at the others to note their response.

Ludo let out an unexpected, rich peal of laughter and picked up an enamelled biscuit tin. He tucked it under an arm and played the lid against the hollow body in accompaniment to Nicholas - Nicholas bit his bottom lip and stretched his concentration to cover a few ceramic figurines with the beat of the chopsticks. As Ludo clapped the edge of the biscuit tin’s lid off surfaces made of brass and wood and the beat grew more frantic in pace, Lymond’s blue eyes lit up. He grabbed a stoneware whisky jug, licked his lips, and blew a hollow, percussive series of notes over the top of the others.

“Gentlemen, please!” Mister Holt the stall-owner tried to protect his wares, but kept having to withdraw his fingers as chopsticks and biscuit tin lid few around the surfaces.

Philippa, who had been momentarily distracted by a particularly cloying flower-seller, turned to the racket with bemusement creasing her brow and a bouffant, past-its-best red rose in her hands. “Yes, _gentlemen_.” She raised her voice, but the noise continued. Londoners, naturally averse to giving street entertainment undue attention, paused to lavish the musicians with doubtful stares. An audience was in danger of forming.

Again, the beat had found a new gait: faster, sillier, the improvised instruments barely holding onto one another through the chase. Lymond could barely keep himself from dissolving into peals of laughter; his cheeks strained to fill with air as he blew into the neck of the jug. Near doubled-over, he fought valiantly on while Ludo’s grin slipped into mania and Nicholas began to panic about the thing he had started.

Smoothly, Philippa picked up a dinner gong from the next stall and raised it above her head, the rose held between her teeth.

She waited for an apposite moment in the others’ music and then brought the hammer to the metal with delighted precision. The sound arced around her and around the market stalls, and for a moment in its wake the only noise was Lymond’s wheezing giggles, his elbows in his stomach as he bent forwards, his eyes fastened shut with mirth.

“The lady wants to tango!” Mister Holt crowed, reclaiming his drumstick/chopsticks, biscuit jar and whisky jug.

Philippa plucked the rose from her mouth and replaced the gong. “The stereotype comes from Flamenco, actually,” she couldn’t resist noting.

“Do you know,” she added, looking at Francis Crawford’s joy-flushed skin. “I don’t think I’ve ever in the whole of my life seen you laugh before.”

“Now that is ridiculous,” Lymond scoffed. He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his fine nose and rubbed at the sides of his head. The gong had stopped ringing for the others long before; for him it only ceased its alarum now, as he worked at the cartilage around his ears. “D'Harcourt, can you still hear the gong?”

Ludo had moved on, however. He was rummaging at a stall closer to the canal, and waved them over. “I found one with actual instruments!”

Perusing the broken ukuleles, chipped castanets and stickless güiros, Philippa found herself humming along to the stall-holder’s portable radio: through poor signal, the strains of Madonna’s most recent number one hit, La Isla Bonita, came through in tinny, thin bursts. Across the market, the bootleg cassette sellers were blaring out a live version of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times.

“Perhaps this is what Red Wedge was missing,” she mused.

“Airplay?” Asked Ludo.

“Don’t be absurd. Funk is what they were missing,” Lymond said. “With the power of funk they might have achieved anything.”

“Be quiet,” Philippa told him good-naturedly. With care, she tucked the rose behind her ear; with the implicit consent of the vendor, she picked up a dusty, nylon stringed guitar and scowled at the flat twang of sound she drew from it. Tuning it as she sauntered about, she identified the props that would complete the look. One, a frilly red satin garment that she tossed around her shoulders, and the other an algae-dusted houseboat that was moored by the locks.

She stepped out onto the roof of the boat and struck a pose. The red satin and rose clashed horribly with her fuchsia pink beret.

Thinking for a moment, with her head turned to the side, her eyes filled with the blue sky above, Philippa permitted herself a little smile of concentration.

Her fingers raced lightly over the strings, pouring out the sound of a riff she had just heard on the radio.

Lymond was the first to recognise what she was doing; he picked up a set of castanets and tossed them to Ludo. Unearthing a thin-skinned bodhran, he hammered out the approximation of the opening drum beat, and Philippa’s chin dipped as she began to play the song’s chords.

“Last night I dreamt of Neil Kinnock,  
Just like he’d never lost, who knew the cost?  
Welshman with eyes like a pin-up,  
It all seems like yesterday, not far away…”

“Oh, come on, you were doing so well, what happened to the last line?” he shook his head, joining her on the roof of the boat.

She played with vicious precision, wondering what news they’d even had in the USSR of the general election. “Then you do better!”

To the sound of Ludo and Nicholas’s castanet-wrangling, Lymond approached the house-boat, frowning thoughtfully at the canal beyond it.

“Stalin said he’d vote for me,  
The SDP a memory,  
Still they let her off scot-free:  
Margaret bloody Thatcher…”

Riled by the detail of his references, Philippa was hot on his heels now:

“And when she privatised,  
All of our industry  
I shrugged and said you can’t blame me  
For that majority.”

The riffs gave her time to think while her hands did all the work:

“I want to be where the rain falls all day,  
Metal gets rusty beneath skies of grey.  
Iron Lady creaking, her cogs slowing down,  
Tories defeated: stripped of her crown.”

She intoned the last line with solemn depth, but her brown eyes glittered with merriment as she surveyed the crowd that had accrued. The slap and twang of the guitar strings as she punctuated the words were diluted first by cheers and applause, and then lost completely as she moved restlessly over a skylight and slipped through the floor of the make-shift stage.

The house boat was not new, nor was it well-maintained, and Philippa crashed into an empty living room that released the stench of damp air upwards to the worried friends who peered inside after her. Having been closest, Lymond lowered himself in to join her and brushed plasterboard and dust aside to check the pulse at her wrist. He squinted up at Ludo and Nicholas. “She’s all right. Just knocked herself out.”

Philippa rested, thoroughly unconscious. The guitar was removed from her pale, limp hands and passed upwards to be returned to the stallholder. Next, with all gentleness, Lymond moved her shoulders to free the red-ruffled cape, which was also handed back. He secured the beret with a couple of soft touches but let the red rose fall as he lifted her from the rubble. It scattered its petals on dust-draped furniture, brightening the room as Lymond left. He took the stairs and, with d'Harcourt’s help, got Philippa’s drooping form through the narrow doorway and out once more into the sun.

“Nicholas has gone to fetch a taxi - I’ll find out whose boat it is and make sure things are accounted for,” d'Harcourt told him.

Lymond nodded. “No haggling, d'Harcourt - however unreasonable the damages sound, just make a note and bring the figure to me.”

He set her on a bench in the early afternoon glow, when the winter’s sun was at its zenith. Letting her lean against his arm, Lymond repeated a snort of mirth uttered earlier. She had Kate’s wit all right, and her righteous sense of justice. Strands of her straight-cropped fringe sat uneasily beneath the disturbed band of her beret, and he touched scarred finger-tips to the strays, freeing them from uncomfortable entanglement with her lashes. She spoke honestly, too, full of her father’s belief in the betterment brought by music. Full of belief in the betterment of all, if they would simply have the courage to try - or, if need be, they might share in hers, the support of which she offered freely, without expectation of return.

Her playing was not what he remembered, either. No longer a willow-straight schoolgirl with a violin hiding her trembling jaw, she had proved herself a creative, confident guitarist - the version of Flash Company she had sung over lunch in the café had been much more than conservative traditionalism. She had taken on board all the skill and respect that Kate and Gideon had for such a well-travelled song, but she had put her lips to it and breathed the sense of lived experience into its wry, melancholy words. It was a song to be sung by jaded women, not one which schoolgirls should understand so well - but then, he reflected, she was no longer a schoolgirl, was she?

He went over the maths in his mind, and found that, though the years had passed quickly, they had left behind them a young woman of twenty: politically engaged, ruthlessly skilled at playing a variety of instruments but led in what she did by love and intuition, and compassionate enough to know that even those who have been defeated need to be given some cause to rally around in celebration of a future.

On his shoulder, the crescents of lashes made stark by mascara, her eyelids shaded with a near-natural shimmer of blues and peach-pinks, she remained oblivious. Lymond saw, for the first time, the fine-boned delicacy of her long nose and curving cheekbones; the copper and fox-red highlights in the mousey-brown hair; the slight, severe line by the upward curve of her mouth. She might yet have been about to move those soft, slightly prominent lips in recitation of satire, but it was illusion for now: she kept her comments to herself, locked in her unconscious.

Her weight against his body seemed to grow as he filled in these details: from childish caricature she had emerged, newly unknowable in all the complete dimensions of humanity. Lymond felt the blood thunder in his wrists; he felt heat and pressure embrace his chest. Forgetting, momentarily, that one must go on drawing breath, even when all sense and observation lie trained on the new arrival before one, he felt his heart thump its protest: one heavy-fisted knock against his sternum and the world had been reset.

“The taxi’s here, Mister Crawford,” Nicholas announced.

**Author's Note:**

> **LINKS/REFERENCES**
> 
> [Raspberry Beret](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dl7vRSu_wsNc&t=YzBlMmIyYjdhMDMzYzM2ZTUwNDFlYTkwNGI5MTk4MThlODZhNjk3OCxwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1)
> 
> [Sign ‘O’ The Times](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D8EdxM72EZ94&t=Mzk5Y2YxYThlZGUyODU2MWZiOGVmNWExMDA1OTEwNTlkNDNkMzQ4ZixwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1)
> 
> [La Isla Bonita](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DzpzdgmqIHOQ&t=ZTgyZjY5MjA0YjJmMTJjMmQ3ZDIxZmUxZjEzMzYxYjI5MDk4NDFmMixwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1) (I know that one of the most delightful things about Languish Locked in L is that it’s just SILLY and FUN and had no deeper meaning (too much politics already) - but forgive my self-indulgence, because politics is kind of a concern over here right now, and also I didn’t have the imagination to just make up something with no subject. [‘Stalin said he’d vote for me’](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fphmmcr.wordpress.com%2F2017%2F04%2F27%2Fwhat-would-genghis-khan-do%2F&t=ZWViYmRlN2FlNWQ2ODA5YTZmODRkZjk0MmU0OTA5MTE2OWYwY2FjMCxwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1), [‘SDP a memory’](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FSocial_Democratic_Party_%28UK%29%23Merger%2C_disestablishment_and_splits&t=ODgyNDYyODQxYWMzZDA0NjdmOWNjZmQwMDA2NDkxYjNhNzAyYzBiNixwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1))
> 
> [Flash Company](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Digt2Mjh3agw&t=YmMxNjZmNTdkMTBjYzliMTE1YzI3ZjJlYTNhN2NhMjA2NmMyNTdhNixwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1) (not the version she sings obviously, but I imagine her version sounded similar)
> 
> [1987 UK general elections](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F1997_United_Kingdom_general_election&t=ZDFjYWM4OTNiZmQ0Y2I3MmU2MjJmZDUyY2Q1NTZiYzc2ZDE5YjQ3OCxwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1)
> 
> [Red Wedge](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FRed_Wedge&t=NzA0YjU2ZDU1ZmE2YjFkYzVjZTc1MGU2Yzc0OGU2YzIyZDgxODM0OCxwUGxhVm0zMQ%3D%3D&b=t%3AaYMxa4gYJ7276gtLB4jdHA&p=https%3A%2F%2Fnotasapleasure.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F188719791082%2Fwhumptober-31&m=1) (the ‘Billy’ who Philippa mentions is Billy Bragg)


End file.
